Demons in My Driveway (12 page)

But whoever kept opening the portals was still out there somewhere.

Six Aegises left in all the world. Things weren’t looking good for the home team.

During a late communal breakfast, I announced my plans. “I’m spending the day at Aggie’s to research the feathers we found. And I need to know what the voice meant by
curator
.”

Riley tensed across the table. “I’m going with you, then.”

I ignored the nervous flutter in my stomach while I buttered my third flaky biscuit and smothered it in honey. “Her cottage is inside the fairy ring. I’ll be fine.”

“I’m still your guardian, Zoey, whatever else happened between us. You’re not going anywhere alone. Not anymore.” His voice was firm.

I started to object, but looked up before I spoke. The set of his jaw and the worry in his eyes were too much to ignore. This whole thing was every bit as difficult on him as it was on me.

Breaking up with him started to seem like a waste of time and emotional pain. We were still having the same arguments, but now we couldn’t kiss and make up afterward.

So much for saving ourselves heartbreak.

“Okay.” I tried to get the word out without choking on it, but Maurice must’ve heard the pain in my voice. He reached under the table and patted my leg.

Mom wiped her mouth on a napkin. “I’m going too. We can search more books that way.”

My eyebrows rose in surprise. Mom had been going over to Aggie’s to have tea with her every afternoon until the portals started turning up. Since then, she hadn’t gone more than a few yards from the house.

Having her there to help me research would make things so much easier. Half the books in Aggie’s library belonged to my mother.

I nodded. “Good. After breakfast, we’ll take a walk over and spend the day with our noses in dusty books.” The more I thought about it, the more I warmed to the idea. After the events of the previous night, it sounded relaxing and kind of fun.

So, my lone journey across my yard and through the woods became a four-person expedition, since Mom never went anywhere without Darius when he was around. On our way out, we spotted Rick heading up the driveway. Panicked, I checked to see that nothing bizarre was obvious to human eyes. No chupacabras hanging from trees, no harpies on my roof and no centaurs sunbathing in the grass. Small movements in the shadows under the front porch made me squint to try to make out the mysterious gnomes living under there, but they went still as Rick approached.

“Morning, folks!” He grinned and hopped out of his truck. “Got a package here I need you to sign for.”

I frowned, taking the box and examining the return address.
Lebanon
,
Kansas.

Riley peered over my shoulder. “Were you expecting anything from headquarters?”

“No. Maybe Bernice brought back a souvenir from England.” I signed my name on the slip of paper and handed it back. “Thanks for bringing it up here.”

Rick beamed at me and hopped into his truck. The dimples in his cheeks reminded me of my ex-husband, Brad—same sort of charm but without the ulterior motives. “My pleasure. You folks have a terrific day!”

He turned around in the driveway and drove off, a cloud of dust in his wake.

“That man is entirely too chipper for a postal worker.” I went to sit on the porch steps to examine the package. It was rectangular, like a shoebox, though much smaller, and it was wrapped in brown paper. My name and address were printed in neat handwriting.

I shook the box, and something rattled around inside. “She’s never sent me anything before. How weird.” I tore open the paper and popped open the lid.

The inside was filled with shredded newspaper as packing material, though considering the contents of the box, it seemed more like the litter people sometimes put in the bottom of a cage.

A tiny wooden man with eyes of chipped turquoise sat up and smiled. “Ah, it’s good to be home!”

I stared in horror. “Oh my God, Gris! She
mailed
you here? What was she thinking?”

He shrugged and climbed out of the box onto the porch railing. “You know Mother. She was thinking I’m a golem and a freak, and mailing made perfect sense.”

I rubbed my finger over the spot between my eyes, feeling tension building. Bernice’s particular forte was the ability to create lifelike golems—people she controlled. They had no awareness of their own, no souls, no consciousness.

Gris had been a miniature, practice model. She’d never animated him, but he’d caught years and years of residual magic on her workshop shelf, and had eventually become self-aware. Bernice had no control over him and couldn’t explain how he came to be.

He thought of her as his mother.

She tried not to think about him at all.

After Gris had traveled with us and had helped me defeat my mother’s kidnapper, he became part of the family. The only reason he’d been back at headquarters was to help Art run the place while Bernice was away. I was supposed to pick him up on the way back, but I’d kind of taken a shortcut with Wiggy.

For some reason, I’d figured Gris would come home on a bus or something. I hadn’t thought it through. Too much had been going on. If anything, I’d figured he’d stay put until things settled down.

“I’m glad you’re home, Gris.” I smiled. I really was glad. He’d weirded me out when we first met. I wasn’t a huge fan of Bernice’s soulless golems made to replace people on the Board who had died. Gris was a tiny version, created as a practice golem Bernice had never meant to bring to life. After traveling and getting to know him, I saw him differently. Unlike Bernice’s big golems, he had emotions of his own. At the last, he’d sacrificed himself to save my life, and I’d given him a piece of myself to bring him back. We were connected now.

Mom bent and kissed him on the top of the head. “You’ve been missed. We’re off to Aggie’s for the afternoon, but I’ll want to hear all about your trip when I get back.”

He grinned and swung his legs on the railing. “I’ll catch up with Maurice.” Gris leaped to his feet. “Is he in the kitchen?” He didn’t wait for an answer, and disappeared through the door Darius held open for him.

I raised an eyebrow. “Thanks for never mailing me anywhere, Mom.”

She squeezed my shoulder, eyes laughing. “Don’t be silly, sweetheart. I’d send you Federal Express. It’s quicker.”

Chapter Twelve

Aggie, of course, was waiting for us at the gate. “My girls! What a wonderful day,
both
of you here for a visit.” She hugged us, one with each arm, then ushered us inside, leaving Riley and Darius outside to keep watch.

What they were watching for, I wasn’t sure, but Aggie sent me out with a plate of cookies and mugs of hot cocoa to keep them busy.

“Seriously, guys.” I set the tray on a small table under a tree. “You don’t have to stay. We’ll call you when we’re done. I promise.”

Both men glanced at me, stuffed cookies into their mouths and said nothing.

“Fine. But it’s freezing out here. Not my fault if you get cold.”

They shrugged and continued to chew. I appreciated their need to be big strong men protecting their women—though Riley and I weren’t together. To me, it wasn’t that they viewed us as weak and vulnerable so much as they viewed themselves as failures if they couldn’t do their jobs. I tried not to roll my eyes as I went inside.

If freezing their manly asses off made them feel more in control of a situation nobody had any control over, who was I to take that away from them? At least they got cookies and hot chocolate.

Mom and Aggie were already in the living room. All the books on the far left belonged to Mom, and she stood with a mug of cocoa in one hand, her other hand running over the dusty spines of cracked leather and fraying cloth. An idyllic smile played across her lips as she browsed.

It struck me how much she must have missed this collection during the twenty years she’d lived mostly alone in a cottage in the woods in far off New Hampshire. Mom lost a lot when she went away—her books, her friends, her home. Dad and I weren’t the only thing she’d given up. I hadn’t truly considered how lonely and isolated she must have felt.

Aggie—nearly identical to my mother in facial expression—stood across the room pulling what looked like random books from the shelves and placing them in a pile on the table next to her.

Most of the books had indecipherable titles, either because the ink had worn off or the language was foreign. Aggie had a gift, though. Books sort of
spoke
to her. She knew which ones had the best chances of giving up the information we needed.

I knew nothing. If I tried to search their crazy library, I’d be yanking books for no good reason and would likely find myself reading about the care and feeding of the long-extinct seven-toed winged seacamel of Barbados.

Aggie turned her head toward me, smiled, and handed me a tome covered in torn green silk that smelled like it had been rescued from a fire. The title was singed away.

“Check in here,” Aggie said. “I have a good feeling about it.”

I plopped into the chair next to her pile of research material, prepared for an afternoon of skimming through ancient texts. This one, it turned out, was a gardening periodical, which caused me to question Aggie’s superpower of finding promising research material by feel alone.

As I flipped through the chapters on working with dryads to enhance soil nutrients, sylph water for lasting moisture, and planting during the equinox for larger blossoms, I stopped to look at the beautiful, faded watercolors placed at the end of each section.

I stopped on one in the chapter titled “Weed Prevention Through Verbal Tuning.” The painting depicted an old man stooped over a row of what looked like radishes, his arms held out from his sides and his lips forming an O. The caption beneath read “Curator singing a simple ballad for healthier vegetable growth.”

I flicked my gaze first at Mom, then at Aggie. Both had expressions of extreme concentration as they scanned the stacks.

Curator
.

The picture was probably a coincidence, totally unrelated to what we were searching for. I reached into a basket on the floor and chose a piece of red ribbon. Aggie kept scraps there to use as bookmarks. I placed it in the book and closed the cover.

The next book in the pile was a cookbook. The cover was in much better shape, but the inside was difficult to read, since it had been handwritten in scrawling cursive rather than printed on a press like the previous one.

Still, it didn’t take me long, flipping through, to come across the word again. The recipe for Curator Pie didn’t sound at all tasty—it combined sheep liver, eucalyptus leaves and dried pig mucus.

I like pie. I like it very much. But I draw the line on mucus of any kind.

I couldn’t be sure, but unless someone is a koala bear, it seemed like eucalyptus leaves might be kind of toxic.

The explanation beneath the recipe described a new moon ritual that didn’t require the Curator to actually eat the pie in question, merely smear it on their person. The writer was unclear as to the purpose of this disgusting action.

I bookmarked it and moved on.

This third book was smaller, handwritten, but in a neat print rather than a scrawled cursive. The cover was soft and pliable, with no title, but the first page declared it to be the private property of Marjorie Willenstock. The first entry was dated June 23, 1872.

As I skimmed through the entries, I realized it was the diary of an Aegis—or rather, a young girl of fourteen who was expected to become an Aegis but didn’t want the title or the responsibilities. I set the book aside to take home with me. If there hadn’t been so many other books I needed to go through, I’d have run home immediately to read Marjorie’s diary.

It might not give me a lot to go on about Curators and Covenants, but it might tell me more about who and what I was.

I’d been late to the party, and nobody around me could tell me what was going on. When I had been trying to find out what an Aegis was, Aggie and I’d had very little success.

Later, we discovered my memory wasn’t the only one the Board had tampered with to keep me from trying to locate my mother. They’d also messed with Aggie’s. They’d failed to remove all her memories of my mother, but they’d done an excellent job of causing Aggie to forget what an Aegis was, making it all the more difficult to figure out what was happening to me.

The Board was never going to be in my good graces. They’d given me far more trouble than help.

We spent hours in that room together, poring over books, pamphlets, travelogues—anything that made Aggie’s fingers tingle or caused Mom to yell an excited yip.

The snippets we collected painted an odd, confusing picture—Curators seemed to be similar in some ways to Aegises, in that they helped the Hidden. But mostly, they communed with nature, grew things, performed rituals and basically behaved like fairy-tale witches.

What the hell that had to do with giant rainbow birds I had no idea.

The only clue we had about the bird itself was a wood-block print in a book of Middle Eastern folk tales. The picture was in black and white, but the bird was the right size. It sat nestled on the top an enormous tree, while elephants, lions and dragons gathered around the trunk looking miniature in comparison to the bird.

Even in faded ink, the bird looked wise and thoughtful, and its tail feathers and wingtips curled up in a way a thunderbird’s did not.

“It’s not a roc, is it?” I held the book out for Aggie to examine.

Her tight curls bounced as she shook her head. “Rocs are jet black and much smaller than this.” She pointed to the base of the tree. “See how tiny the elephant is? A roc can pick up an elephant, but it would take both claws. This bird here could pick up two or three elephants with a single claw.”

“That’s a big bird,” I said. “So what is it?”

“That’s the Simurgh.” She pushed the book back toward me. “Read the stories in this. They’ll tell you all about it.”

“It? There’s only one?”

Aggie bent to pick up a few of the books I’d been through and rejected. “Well, they’re just stories, of course. But according to some legends, the Simurgh was the first Hidden to step out of the Wild Mists of Story.”

Mom shelved the book in her hand and joined us. “So, you don’t think it’s real?”

Aggie raised her hand, palm up. “Who knows? That was a very long time ago, and nobody I know has ever seen the Simurgh.”

“Papa Dino said the First Hidden was a giant bird. It wouldn’t still be alive, would it?” I flipped through the book in my hand, keeping one finger on the page with the picture. “Maybe it had descendants, though.”

I rubbed my burning eyes. I’d been squinting in poor light at faded script for too many hours. “Those feathers had to come from somewhere.”

Mom took the book from me and closed it. “Take a break. If the answers are in there, they’ll still be in there later.”

Aggie headed into the kitchen, flapping a glittering, ring-bedecked hand at us. “Come with me. We’ll look for answers elsewhere for awhile.”

We gathered around her kitchen table with fresh mugs of hot, minty tea to refresh us. I’d suspected Aggie might pull out her bag of runes, but instead, she brought forth a deck of cards I’d never seen before.

Aggie mixed the cards—I’d say shuffle, but she kind of riffled them together several times rather than doing it the way a Vegas dealer might. When she was satisfied, she set the cards on the table and gestured to my mom.

“Cut the deck, Clara.” Her lips drew together in a serious expression.

Mom shook her head and pushed away from the table a few inches. “No. Let Zoey. I don’t think I want to be read today.”

I tilted my head at her. Aggie had already predicted her own death in the near future. I didn’t necessarily believe in all of this stuff, but if Mom was about to pull a card announcing her death, too, was impending, maybe I didn’t want to know. It was hard enough to keep us all alive as it was without dire predictions saying I was attempting the impossible.

The less I knew, the less likely I was to cause a self-fulfilling prophecy.

My future, on the other hand, made me curious. Who could resist taking a peek, real or imagined?

“Cut them?” I asked.

Aggie nodded. “Wherever it feels right.”

I grabbed the top cards of the deck and slid my fingers down the pile until I had the urge to stop, then lifted the top two-thirds to set aside.

Aggie smiled, and placed the bottom third on top of the new pile, then turned the top card over.

In every movie I’d ever watched, people somehow managed to snag the Death card under these circumstances. In fact, having never seen a full deck of tarot cards before, I’d always been suspicious that all the cards were, in some way, representative of the Death card. It was more dramatic that way.

My breath caught when I saw the card Aggie placed before me.

Not the Death card.

This card was hand painted in bright colors. The animals were gone, and the tree the bird nested in wasn’t as large, but I
knew
what I was looking at.

This was a picture of the Simurgh in all its rainbow glory.

Mom leaned across the table to get a better look, her long hair—so much like mine—brushing my arm. “Is that a phoenix?”

“It’s the Simurgh,” I said, my voice hushed.

“No.” Aggie tapped a finger on the card. “She’s right. This is the Phoenix. It’s a major arcana card, meaning change and transformation.”

I snorted. “I didn’t need my fortune told to know change is coming.”

Aggie took the card and flipped it over on the deck. “Not just change. The Phoenix represents the death and rebirth cycle. You know, it dies in a fiery blast, then is reborn anew from the ashes?”

I frowned. “I’m going to die and come back to life?”

She patted my hand. “Don’t take things so literally, dear.” She gathered the cards and shuffled them a little, then gave my mother a questioning glance. Mom shook her head, declining again to have her fortune read.

I found that disconcerting, though I didn’t press.

Plus, the whole death-and-resurrection prediction was wigging me out. I was trying to prevent what amounted to the zombie apocalypse—not to mention the recent appearance of vampires. I didn’t want to read too much into the fortune-teller thing—which I wasn’t entirely convinced was legitimate—but both zombies and vampires could be considered the result of dying and coming back to life.

I suppressed a shiver. Not how I’d planned to live out my life—or afterlife.

As morbid as the thought was, I didn’t think that was exactly what the card was trying to tell me. “Aggie, are you sure that was a phoenix? It looked a lot like the drawing I found of the Simurgh.”

Aggie gave me a sideways glance and a half smile. “Honey, they’re not that different. The Simurgh holds all the knowledge of the world. According to some of the stories, it’s died and resurrected a hundred times over. The phoenix is just another representation of the Simurgh.” She shrugged. “If you believe folklore.”

After all that I’d seen and all the fantastical creatures I’d met, I was far more inclined to believe in folklore than tarot cards. In this instance, it seemed they went hand in hand.

In spite of Aggie’s resistance, I left her to chat with Mom while I moved to the sink and washed up the dishes we’d dirtied. The delicate china of the plates she used to serve cookies seemed more breakable next to the heavy mugs from our tea and cocoa. Kind of like Aggie herself. She was a force of nature, invincible and powerful, housed in the tiny, frail body of a woman who admitted to being well over a hundred years old. She seemed to be ageless, yet older than a redwood.

My stomach knotted at her prediction of her own looming death. I’d only had her back in my life for about a year.

I wasn’t ready to give her up.

As I placed the last hand-dried mug in its cupboard, my phone vibrated in the front pocket of my jeans. The text was from Kam. We’d left her on the front porch to keep an eye on things.

Portal in the driveway. Talia’s here. So is Sara. Better come home.

I swore under my breath and texted her back that I was on my way.

“I have to go.” I kissed Aggie on the cheek. “Stay and visit, Mom.”

Mom frowned. “Are you sure? What’s wrong?”

I kissed her cheek too. “It’s a Sara thing, not an end-of-the-world thing.”

“Well, for heaven’s sake,” Aggie said. “Send Clara’s young man in on your way past. No need for him to sit out in the cold by himself. He’s not the one you’re punishing.”